


'Til the Sirens Sound v.2

by dtkrushnics



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 23:21:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2750963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dtkrushnics/pseuds/dtkrushnics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>an alternative 9.23 coda. again, the title is taken from "Earth" by Sleeping At Last!</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Til the Sirens Sound v.2

When Catholicism was young, when it was finding its footing as a newborn fawn learns to stand, Castiel would come to Earth. He would stand in the shadows of a barn or a home, listening in as persecuted crypto-Christians practiced in secret, spoke their vows, looking fervently over their shoulders. They exchanged faith in Latin, touching their hands to their foreheads in seek of guidance. And, occasionally, they would sing. They would recite hymns in low voices, off-key and afraid but together, in one voice, in communion.

At the door, Castiel would turn Roman soldiers from their meeting, deafen their ears so they would not suspect. All while listening to the psalms, closing his eyes against the melodies, struck in an area he never knew quite how to name. While the candles flickered and night fell across towns steeped in secret devotions, Castiel listened to hymns. Oh, how they filled him with being. Oh, how they tapped at the stone in which he had been built to be encased, how they could softly breathe on him and melt it all away. How beautiful the songs were, and how beautiful the hope the songs elicited on the practitioners’ faces.

There is a song on the wind tonight. Castiel hears it, as his car’s tires burn the asphalt of the road back to Lebanon. He hears it, whistling against the grill, humming through the engine and out the exhaust pipe. He sees the lines imprinted stark white against the otherwise empty night sky, rolling through like credits, and the sound of them should fill him with that wonder again, with that awe.

But this hymn just sounds like an elegy. It sounds like a funeral song.

Not for the first time, Castiel curses his humanity. He curses the lack of wings at his back, and his back retaliates by cutting him open with phantom limb pain. His grip tightens on the steering wheel, his foot presses down harder on the accelerator. The lurch of the car echoes through to his stomach. He pulls over for a minute, sixty seconds, that’s it, that’s all he will allow, though he is damp with sweat and his skin is pale and he cannot seem to swallow down the rock lodged firmly in his throat.

Sixty seconds, and he is back on the road, because he thinks, he hopes he has enough residual power to bring a man back to life. He thinks his stolen grace will serve. He can feel it, giving an occasional spark to his veins, but the jolt gets weaker with each passing hour, and Lebanon is far. Castiel presses until his foot is flat to the floor of the car and he can’t press down any farther.

How can one tell reality from fiction? That is the classic Cartesian question. How do I know any of this is real? How do I know any of this is actually happening? It does not seem real. The night seems phantasmagorical. There are lights, but are they the product of the headlights hitting the reflective median, or are they an illusion? Does the theory relate to the practice of idealism? So long as I have not perceived it, it does not exist. It is not real. And this, inevitably, leads to the anthropic principle, a suggestion which has an uncomfortably tautological ring to it. Why should anything exist at all? The universe appears the way it does only by virtue of our presence as observers in it.

Castiel has never considered himself an empiricist – his entire way of life has been based on matters of faith and blind trust, after all – but he finds himself exploring it anyway. These things that have been told to him cannot be real, because he has not seen them, and therefore they do not exist, they cannot exist, they cannot be true.

Dean is not dead, he tells himself. It’s as simple as that, he tells himself. I have not seen it and there is no way I would not feel it, so he is not dead, he tells himself.

Castiel wishes Descartes were here to explain the philosophy to him anyway, because there is still a part of him that is afraid.

The song builds. Castiel tells it to be quiet. It does not listen, because it does not exist. Nor does the entrance of the bunker, at which he arrives. He does not look at it. He is at war with himself, between I must save Dean and Dean does not need saving. If he saves Dean, it is because Dean needed saving, it is because he is actually dead, and Castiel rejects that theory. Dean is fine.

Castiel closes his hand around the door to the bunker, and it is real. The song runs, low and mournful, through Castiel’s veins. He opens the door. The main room is empty. He touches things as he passes – a book, a table, a lamp, real, real, real. He comes to Dean’s room. The door is closed. Dean is on the other side of that door, probably watching television or sleeping, and he will grumble at Castiel for interrupting his favorite show or his nap. He will say that Metatron never showed up where he was supposed to, but that’s awesome that you got him anyway, Castiel. I knew you could do it, Castiel.

There is a bed, and on it is a body.

Something has happened to the singers of the hymn. The Roman soldiers have broken down the door, they are lifting their weapons, they are grabbing the singers and twisting them around and the singers are screaming, they’re screaming so loudly and weeping and praying to God and the Roman soldiers are beating them.

Castiel’s heart, that place that he found so difficult to name, is trying so very hard to expunge itself from his chest. It is pushing against the inside of his ribs. It will not stop. Castiel falls to his knees, and it hurts. The floor is real. He digs his fingers into the bed. The sheets are real. He rests the palm of his hand against Dean’s sternum, feels the lack of a steady beat of muscle, the coldness of the skin. Real. It’s real, and so is the blurring of Castiel’s vision, and so is the ripping sensation at the center of his being.

He tries for the spark. He tries to find the stolen grace inside of him. His fingertips, they start to glow, and it’s real, he will bring him back, that’s real.

But at the first sign of light, Dean is burning. And he grabs Castiel’s arm, real, shoving him away, real, and he has his teeth bared and his eyes open but they are not the eyes that Castiel knows, nor is it the man that Castiel knows, and Castiel blinks and the monster inside the man rears its smoky and blackened head, and Castiel cannot breathe, because the monster’s hand is locked around his throat and there is nothing left of Dean.

And, oh, God, Castiel thinks, as the singers are carried off limp and broken to be imprisoned, as his eyes lock on the black that used to be green, it’s real.


End file.
